Major Bruce Kinloch

Major Bruce Kinloch, who has died 91, was awarded a Military Cross at the
Battle of the Sittang Bridge in Burma.

6:10PM BST 04 Sep 2011

In February 1942 Kinloch was adjutant of the 1st Battalion 3rd Queen Alexandra’s Own Gurkha Rifles (1/3 GR). His battalion had been rushed from India to Burma after the Japanese invasion and endured days of choking dust as it hurried along winding jungle tracks through tinder-dry teak forests; the soldiers’ aim was to reach the Sittang Bridge and so deny the Japanese a gateway to Rangoon and the heart of southern Burma.

On the morning of February 21 they came under attack from Japanese bombers. These were followed by Zero fighter aircraft, which raked the columns of weary soldiers with machinegun fire and set the jungle ablaze.

The Japanese were holding a twin-hill feature on the eastern side of the river, close to the final approach to the bridge. Forward companies of 1/3 GR close by were pinned down by heavy automatic fire; when Kinloch, at Battalion HQ, was ordered to contact them he saw it as a death sentence. His CO went himself and was indeed killed.

At first light the next day Kinloch was awakened by three huge explosions. A decision had been made to blow the bridge before the Japanese overwhelmed the small bridgehead force, took it and crossed the river in strength.

Kinloch’s battalion, together with most of 17th Indian Infantry Division, were stranded on the wrong side of a river 6oo yards wide. Many in the forward companies had been taken prisoner and the rest – dog-tired with incessant fighting, short of food, water and ammunition – were outraged at being abandoned.

That afternoon, Kinloch put machine guns at the head of his force and cut through the jungle to the river. He organised a defensive perimeter and set the rest of the men to building rafts.

The Japanese seemed to have vanished. After reconnoitring the eastern end of the blown bridge, Kinloch climbed up a jungle track in search of some sign of the enemy. As he approached a huge forest tree, he saw the outline of a head. Drawing his revolver, he challenged the figure. The head disappeared. With one bound he reached the tree and, peering cautiously around the massive trunk, found himself looking straight into the face of a Japanese officer. The man was in black boots, wore a soft peaked cap and carried a Samurai sword.

Kinloch leapt back and, pulling a grenade from his binoculars pouch, rolled it, smoking gently, around the tree. He heard a gasp, a scuffle of feet and a shattering explosion.

The air came alive, he said afterwards, with the whip-like crack of bullets as machineguns opened fire from all sides. A heavy machinegun from across the river joined in as he sprinted back down the track.

He regained the bridgehead without a scratch but his men were being cut down by mortars and small arms fire. Kinloch had to find some ferry boats. As darkness fell, he and two comrades slipped into the river, pushing in front of them a bamboo raft lashed together with rifle slings and loaded with their clothes and pistols.

They swam across but saw no sign of Allied troops; eventually they found a sampan and, by dawn, after five trips, all the wounded from the different units had been ferried to the western bank. Kinloch returned to his depleted battalion on the eastern bank, which then moved two miles downstream, and the next night swam the river again to try to organise a larger ferry operation. While he was on the western bank he heard firing on the other side of the river and saw the Japanese swarming out of the jungle. After a fight the rest of the battalion was surrounded and forced to surrender.

Kinloch set off with some of the wounded men he had previously ferried over when, walking across a paddy field, he was bitten in the foot by a viper. A comrade pluckily sucked out the venom and Kinloch reached Allied lines with nothing worse than a swollen leg. He was awarded an immediate Military Cross.

Bruce Grant Kinloch was born at Saharanpur, India, where his father was stationed, on August 27 1919. He was educated at Berkhamsted School, where he was in the Shooting VIII.

After RMC Sandhurst he was commissioned into the Indian Army in 1939 and posted to 3rd Queen Alexandra’s Own Gurkha Rifles. He saw active service with the 1st Battalion on the North-West Frontier and took part in punitive operations in Waziristan against the Faqir of Ipi.

For much of 1943 the battalion, having re-formed and retrained, held a line of positions in the Chin Hills, northern Burma. In December, Kinloch was ordered to attack a Japanese force which was dug into deep underground bunkers high up on a rocky, knife-edge ridge.

“Brigade must be mad even to suggest it,” Kinloch told his CO. “Who do they think is crazy enough to tackle it?”

“You,” his CO replied.

Kinloch led two rifle companies in the assault. In the event he was mistakenly bombed by Allied aircraft, shelled and mortared by the enemy, and forced to withdraw.

In 1944, he was second-in-command of 4th/9th Gurkha Rifles and subsequently commanded the battalion. After the end of the campaign in Burma, he ran some of the first jungle warfare courses and, after partition in 1947, joined the Colonial Service.

His first posting was that of District Officer at Kilifi on the Kenya Coast, where he became involved in the pursuit and capture of ivory poachers and smugglers. In 1949 he transferred to the Uganda Game and Fisheries Department as assistant to the chief game warden, succeeding to that post a year later. Over the next decade he was responsible for the expansion and development of the department.

In 1960 he moved to the Tanganyika (later Tanzania) Game Department as chief game warden. While in this post he launched the College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, to train Africans to become game and national park wardens in newly-independent African countries.

He retired in 1964 and, following a series of advisory posts as wildlife adviser to Bechuanaland (later Botswana), Cape Province and Malawi, in 1973 he joined a 4,000 acre mixed farming estate in the Yorkshire Dales.

After the death of its owner, he worked for the Yorkshire Water Authority in land and fisheries management. Four years in Spain followed before he retired to Fownhope, Herefordshire.

As well as contributing many articles to the Shooting Times, he published The New Noah (1955), Shamba Raiders (1972), Game Wardens in Africa (1981) and Tales from a Crowded Life (2008). Shamba Raiders, written with passion and authority, was particularly well received. It is an account of the struggle to preserve East Africa’s herds of game which were then, and still are, threatened by poaching, wars and population growth.

Bruce Kinloch died on June 21. He married in 1943, Elizabeth Charter. She predeceased him and he is survived by their daughter.